Capital studios: Hollywood comes to London

Tom Cruise lurking in Piccadilly, Meryl Streep storming Parliament and the Millennium Falcon landing in Soho. London is fast becoming the movie-makers’ home of choice thanks to generous tax breaks, home-grown talent and sought-after scenery. Eddie’s Oscar is just the beginning, says Alice-Azania Jarvis

Hollywood, California, the home of film for the past 100 years

Alice-Azania Jarvis

25 February 2015

As the stars of the silver screen headed off to party in the early hours of Monday morning, the hot topics of conversation, in descending order, were Emma Stone’s chartreuse-yellow Elie Saab gown, Travolta’s touchy-feely turn as a presenter and just how many British accents there were.

Home-grown films and talent received more than 30 nominations, including nods for Best Actor, for Londoners Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne, and Best Actress, for Felicity Jones and Rosamund Pike. With Redmayne walking away victorious, and with Brits also picking up gongs for make-up and hairstyling (Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier for their work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), visual effects (Paul Franklin and Andrew Lockley for Interstellar) and live action short film (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas for The Phone Call) — the message was clear: the UK film industry is on the up.

It’s not just a matter of Sunday’s big hitters, plenty of British productions are flourishing. Paddington, voiced by Ben Whishaw and starring Hugh Bonneville, has taken more than £130m since opening in November to become the highest-grossing family movie outside Hollywood. The Inbetweeners 2 took more than £33m in the UK alone, while the new Wallace and Gromit spin-off, Shaun the Sheep Movie, is tipped for similar success. And Bond makes a comeback at the end of the year in Spectre.

As a result, international movie-makers are flocking to the UK — and particularly to London, where three-quarters of the industry is based. Spending on film production here reached a record £1.47bn in 2014 — an increase of 35 per cent on the year before. Some £1.23bn came from international productions — up 40 per cent. In the past 12 months, London and its surrounds have hosted the cast of Disney’s Cinderella and Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, both shot at Pinewood, as well as Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass and Avengers: Age of Ultron at Shepperton. No wonder the capital has been nicknamed ‘Hollywood on Thames’.

‘It used to be that people in the industry gravitated towards LA,’ says Adrian Wootton, chief executive of Film London, the agency charged with developing the screen industries in the capital. ‘Now, people in LA talk about their colleagues being here — Hollywood’s coming to us.’ Warner Bros has just finished building three state-of-the-art stages at its studio in Leavesden, near Watford, site of the recently completed Tarzan remake, starring Alexander Skarsgård. Bold Films, the LA-based production company behind the three-Oscar- winning Whiplash and critically acclaimed Nightcrawler, has opened a new office in Mayfair. And last summer, Lionsgate, distributor of The Hunger Games films, relocated its international sales HQ from Santa Monica to Soho.

It’s a long way from the dark days of the early 1990s. Twenty years ago, a mere 46 films were made in the UK, compared with more than 220 this year. Even Bond — which had delivered a reliable hit every few years since the 1960s — disappeared from screens between 1989 and 1995 thanks to legal disputes. ‘The industry wasn’t sophisticated or grown-up,’ says Working Title’s Eric Fellner, who, along with fellow producers Tim Bevan, Lisa Bruce and Anthony McCarten, was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar for The Theory of Everything, but lost out to Birdman. ‘Most of us viewed it as what one would refer to as a cottage industry.’

Triumph: Eddie Redmayne with his Best Actor Oscar

What’s changed? Finances, for one thing. Since 2007, a series of tax breaks has made filming in the UK increasingly cost-effective. Productions spending more than 10 per cent of their budget here — and fulfilling a set of criteria ensuring the money goes back into the British economy — can claim relief of up to 25 per cent on much of their costs. International co-productions, where films are jointly created by companies based in different countries — such as Mr Turner, a British, French and German co-production — can get wider access to benefits.

But there’s also a growing recognition of the skills on offer. ‘The tax credits without the talent wouldn’t amount to much,’ says Josh Berger, president and managing director of Warner Bros UK, Ireland and Spain. ‘Our talent in front of and behind the camera is among the best in the world.’ Since 1999, films made here have paid a voluntary ‘training levy’ of 0.5 per cent of their budget (up to £40,412.45). Administered by industry body Creative Skillset, it’s raised more than £10m towards everything from mentoring programmes to supporting institutions such as The London Film School. Lottery funding, introduced in 1995, has offered British productions the chance to punch above their weight on the global stage. More than £26m a year is distributed towards development, production and distribution by the BFI. When recipients, such as Philomena and The King’s Speech, win big at the award ceremonies, it puts this talent in the spotlight. As Fellner puts it: ‘There’s a lot of cross-pollination — success breeds success.’

It’s not only our actors and directors, says Iain Canning, producer of The King’s Speech and founder of See-Saw Films: ‘We’ve been able to grow into the technical side of the business. If you can find the wonderful source material, you can then populate your film with some of the best people in the world on a crew level.’ We have leading figures in sound engineering (such as Gravity’s Chris Munro and Skyfall’s Stuart Wilson), cinematography (Dick Pope and Roger Deakins were both up for Oscars, for Mr Turner and Unbroken) and costume design (this year, Jacqueline Durran, who studied at the Royal College of Art, was nominated for her work on Mr Turner). And our technical abilities — particularly in the growing visual effects industry — are world-beating. The streets around Soho and Fitzrovia house half a dozen top-flight VFX companies, including Double Negative, Framestore and Moving Picture Company (MPC), all of which were up for the Best Visual Effects gong on Sunday. While Double Negative, which also picked up the BAFTA earlier this month, won for Interstellar, MPC and Framestore received a joint nomination for Guardians of the Galaxy, and MPC was also nominated for X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Paul Franklin, who headed up Double Negative’s team for Interstellar, attributes the British VFX boom to the decision to base the Harry Potter films at Leavesden: ‘It gave us a steady stream of work at the highest level — we could plan into the future, build research and development teams, and train artists. It elevated everybody’s game.’ When the first Potter film was shot in 2000, less than a third of the effects were produced in Britain. By the series’ conclusion in 2010, it was more like 95 per cent. Now, Hollywood studios are clamouring to hire British companies to work on their blockbusters — in the atrium of Double Negative’s Great Portland Street headquarters, stills from its previous hits, including Iron Man 2 and The Dark Knight, line the walls. Framestore made the ground-breaking visual effects for Gravity, in which almost everything on screen was created with CGI. It’s no coincidence that in October, Industrial Light and Magic, the visual effects division of Disney-owned Lucasfilm, opened a new outpost in Soho.

Vibrant: Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire, where the Star Wars sequels are being filmed

Of course, London also offers fantastically cinematic scenery. And it’s versatile: ‘In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, we were London but we were also Russia,’ says Wootton of the Chris Stone action film. Likewise, he points out, several Shanghai shots in 2012’s Skyfall featured London skyscrapers. While this isn’t new, what has changed is the city’s accessibility. ‘Ten years ago London was seen as bureaucratic, slow, full of red tape and not user-friendly,’ says Wootton. Since then, a raft of measures has opened it up, including the creation of a dedicated Metropolitan Police Film Unit (MPS) to ensure security on set, and new laws allowing roads to be closed for up to seven days in a row, enabling large-scale shoots. Filming on the streets of London has increased by 50 per cent. Last year, MPs gave permission for Parliament to be used as a set for the first time; scenes for the forthcoming drama Suffragette were shot in the central lobby.

And then there’s the fact that London is simply an exciting, culturally appealing place to be. As Amanda Nevill, CEO of the BFI, puts it: ‘It’ll always be a destination of choice. We have fantastic art galleries and theatre, amazing restaurants, extraordinary fashion.’ Last month, during Sunday brunch service at Bar Boulud in Knightsbridge, you could point out Morgan Freeman, Daniel Radcliffe, Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco and Woody Harrelson — all believed to be working on Now You See Me: The Second Act. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke said she found the architecture ‘flat-out inspiring’, while working on the upcoming romcom Miss You Already last year. Harvey Weinstein, a long-standing champion of British film, whose company distributed Philomena, The King’s Speech and The Imitation Game in the US, has credited our ‘literary tradition’ for his Anglophilia. His BAFTA party is the hot ticket during the London-based awards. And Soho House’s Nick Jones recently told GQ that director JJ Abrams became so enamoured with the burgers served at Jones’ Dirty Burger chain that there was a van ‘almost constantly’ on the Star Wars set.

So will 2015 be an even bigger year for Hollywood-on-Thames? The signs are there. More studio expansion is planned: Pinewood is to spend £200m doubling its site. Elstree Studios is increasing by 25 per cent. There are plenty of Brit flicks to look forward to: Mr Holmes, starring Ian McKellen as a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes, recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Both Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter and Carey Mulligan, and Legend, starring Tom Hardy as both Kray twins, are expected in the autumn. With filming on the forthcoming Potter spin-off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, due to take place at Leavesden, and Pinewood to provide the location for the second in the new Star Wars trilogy, Star Wars: Episode VIII, the UK clearly has a huge appeal for international film-makers. ‘You could easily argue that we are in a new golden age of cinema and film-making here,’ says Berger. ‘I’m optimistic — we’ve got all the ingredients to keep this going.’

Capital studios: Hollywood comes to London

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